Health and Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Willis of Knaresborough

Committee stage
Friday 4th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)]

My Lords, I first apologise for not being present at Second Reading. It is unusual for me not to be there when a health Bill is being discussed, but I have had a lot of personal family problems.

Never, in the years I have been in both the Commons and the House of Lords, have I been as proud of a committee as I have been chairing the one on sport and recreation. I thought the committee would look very narrowly at sport and recreation and what could be done for them, but it ended up with a set of proposals that are quite revolutionary, which state something really quite different about the way forward, not only for sport and recreation but for the NHS itself. I am deeply indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, for his leadership as our special adviser and for his membership of the committee, and of course to the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, who is not here today, whose experience of working in the Department for Education was invaluable. As we heard earlier in the debate, that department has a crucial role to play in developing some of these key policies.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, I would have preferred for this proposed new clause to be debated as a separate entity, but perhaps it was fitting that it was grouped with amendments that have a common theme, because despite the disagreements between various parts of the House on the previous set of amendments, they are all based around the same issue of how we get a healthier nation. It was incredibly rewarding to see that.

It might seem quite obvious that during the Health and Care Bill in the House of Lords we should be talking about health matters and improving health, but I have to say that, together with the 2012 Bill, so much of this legislation is about shifting the chairs again; it is not about looking at the future health of the nation. There will be marginal improvements from the bureaucratic changes in the Bill, but I was looking at what we can do to make a fundamental difference, and we will not do that until we change the fact that, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, said in that debate, the NHS is currently a repair-and-maintain service. It cannot go on like that because the money will run out and the number of people serving it will run out. We have to change it to a prevent-and-improve service, and that is what the new clause proposed by Amendment 297C is about.

It proposes just a minimum of reorganisation: for instance, simply moving sport from DCMS to the Department of Health is not a massive reorganisation. With moderate investment—nowhere in our report do we spend time talking about massive investments to get change; this is really about changes of attitudes—it has the potential to change the way in which the NHS operates to a very different mode of making sure that people do not get ill, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, quite rightly said. Indeed, the previous amendments were all about that too. Those amendments rounded on obesity and childhood obesity, and that is an area that we should be tackling; there should be masses of things in this Bill which are about supporting that, not just the odd one or two. Making people active from the cradle to the grave, or near the grave, seems to me the right thing to do.

Other amendments in this group rightly observe that what people eat and drink is related to their health outcomes. Given the alarming levels of obesity we have heard about this morning, I am very supportive of some of those, and particularly what the Government are doing in advertising. I fully support their approach, though clearly it is not a once-and-for-all idea.

How is it possible that the UK is world-leading in elite and professional sports, that 3 billion people across the world watch our Premier League matches in over 187 different countries and that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has consistently said, at Olympics after Olympics we are near the top of the league in terms of our elite activities, yet for decades we have failed at grass-roots level to get more people from more diverse backgrounds to be more active, despite all the investment that successive Governments have made?

With one-third of the adult population at the moment getting less than 150 minutes of moderate activity each week; with schoolchildren doing consistently less activity both at school and at home; with PE marginalised in the school curriculum and no longer inspected by Ofsted while, as we heard in our evidence, many primary school teachers get less than three hours’ training in a three-year degree course, which is shameful, so physical literacy in most of our primary schools means nothing, frankly, because it does not appear on the league tables; with access to facilities ever more difficult; with local authorities closing swimming pools and leisure centres to save resources; and with transport non-existent for large parts of the day for large swathes of the community, we have become one of the most lazy, inactive nations in the modern world. Those sections of the population with the poorest diets and the worst levels of deprivation are, not surprisingly, the least active, too, and of course the pandemic has disproportionately affected all the target groups.

My colleagues and I sought in our report not to blame Governments, local authorities or sports and recreation providers, who have worked hard to maintain facilities. This is not a party-political amendment at all; all the groups on the committee were totally united. All the empirical evidence that we looked at shows the huge benefits from being active: improving learning at school; improving mental health; building up resilience and resistance to disease; and, above all, making people happier and more positive in life.

What is more, investing in active lives, as the Health Foundation research demonstrated, would save countless billions of pounds of future NHS spending by placing sport, physical activity and well-being at the heart of government within the Department of Health; by establishing in law an office for health promotion, sport and well-being to replace the Office for Health Inequalities and Disparities—whatever that means—with the same personnel as initially proposed by the Prime Minister himself; by making the Minister for Public Health, Sport and Wellbeing responsible for preparing the national plan that the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, has so ably proposed, a plan that is at the centre of government policy in New Zealand, Australia, Norway and Sweden; by ensuring that the school curriculum places physical literacy alongside numeracy and literacy as a core subject; by making it mandatory for local authorities to provide active-life facilities; and by ensuring that the duties of care and safeguarding, so brilliantly articulated in the earlier review by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, are actually given legal enforcement status, years after they were proposed. We can begin by addressing the physical well-being of this nation. There need be no massive new bureaucracies. Using existing organisations, centralising policy and using the office for health promotion would be a game-changer.

If the noble Earl, Lord Howe, is a supporter of the levelling-up agenda, and I am pretty sure that he is a strong supporter, how better to make his mark than by supporting this amendment? It goes right to the heart of those government policies. If you are going to level up, level up at the start and make sure that we have an active nation.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I regret that I cannot follow the edict of that late, great Liberal Democrat, Nicholas Parsons, and speak for only one minute. The Committee knows that it is my habit to speak very briefly, but unfortunately I cannot do that on this occasion, although I will do my best. It is my duty as a member of the APPGs for health, obesity and a fit and healthy childhood to scrutinise this legislation and the large raft of amendments that have been made to it.

The intention of Clause 144 is of course to reduce the rise in childhood obesity, an objective with which we all agree. An early attempt to do this via legislation was the UK soft drinks industry levy, the so-called sugar tax, which was introduced in 2018. Before the levy was introduced, it had already resulted in over 50% of manufacturers reducing the sugar content of their products after it was announced in March 2016, the equivalent of 45 million kilograms of sugar every year. That was the intention: to reformulate, not to raise tax. Since then it has continued to be highly effective in encouraging reformulation. In the 12 months following its introduction, the consumption of soft drinks rose by 7.7% as people chose healthier options, so neither the food industry nor the TV advertising industry suffered at all.